Ruth Reichl makes it obvious from the beginning of "Tender at the Bone", that she grew up in a far from ordinary family, her mother being the cause of much of this weirdness. Her mother plays the central role in her family and thus has a powerful impact on Ruth. This impact is vast and c...

The divorce of my parents on my fourteenth birthday... The death of my grandmother, my closest relative... When these tragedies occurred, I acted as though nothing was wrong, like that was how it was supposed to be. During our countries "Gilded Age", the immigrants who came fr...

Yasujiro Ozu's cinematic classic "Tokyo Story" portrays the essentially divided nature of old and young individuals, even within the same family, that existed in Japan during the immediate aftermath and cultural shift that occurred as a result of that nation's loss of World War II. The fi...

Many kids in our society are being put on the streets. Lack of love within their family is lost and they must find heir own way to survive. In Homecoming, there are four kids left in the parking lot of a shopping center. All they were told was that they were to listen to their older sister, Dicey. ...

The story 'Araby' by James Joyce tells about a young boy who is in love with his friend's older sister. The boy lives with his aunt and uncle in a house that was once owned by a priest. The boy and his family live on a street that is very quiet except when the boy's school, the Christian Brothers...

Every person treasures a place of his own, a place where beautiful memories are embedded. Or it can be some area where an individual feels at ease. As for myself, there can be no place like this other than my home. I live in an apartment located in the suburbs of Manila. From afar, the house seems ...

On Aug. 18, 1929, Juan Salvador Villasenor married Lupe Gomez in a church in Santa Ana, Calif. Each came from a family that had fled the horrors of the Mexican Revolution. The life their families led before that cataclysm and their eventual settlement in the United States is one of survival and wond...

I have found that not all squalls to books are as equally great as the first. In the case of Anne Rice's book, Vittorio this holds true. When I first read the book Pandora, I was astounded at how much I enjoyed reading it, but Vittorio was not the same. It was dull from the very begi...

In the book of Genisis Jacob and Joseph are father and son whom both have a conflict with their brother(s). Jacob's conflict is with Esau while Josephs conflict is with all of his brothers excluding one who shared Joseph's birth mother Rachel. The conflicts stem from jealousy in one case a...